


Wind At Your Heels

by resplendissante



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-09
Updated: 2011-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-25 21:28:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resplendissante/pseuds/resplendissante
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A history in cutting class.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wind At Your Heels

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the XMMFicathon about a million years ago (well, six). It's still pretty okay! And one of my friends really likes it; so why not. It is rated 'mature' for implied violence and implied sex, and the kind of language I used to get detention for using in a Catholic school, but there's nothing graphic.
> 
> This was written in the blissful period before X3 came out. Ah, innocence.

He came back with burnt hands, short hair, blank eyes: A wild mess of a boy, wind-blown and staggering with the weight of torture hard on his shoulders. Miss Munroe and Mr Summers flanked him without touching him, not out of unkindness or coldness, but because his arms were swollen, wrapped in layers and layers of soft cotton, bulked up for everyone to see. Every so often on the way in, he stumbled periodically, tripping over something hardly there, only to right himself, shaking off intrusive hands. It was perhaps the first time that St. John Allerdyce had appeared less than self-contained; now, it was as though his edges bled into the scenery. It gave him a soft-focus that, rather than flattering him, muted him, seeming to shut off all sound and light and identity until he could have been a drunk bum tripping down to the mansion, begging for handouts.

He smelt of Flamazine and smoke when he passed Bobby.

For the first time in Bobby’s experience, John didn’t even look; did not cast his eyes sarcastically at Bobby, as though to say, _What the fuck do you think you’re doing, buddy?_. Did not let his gaze linger on Marie’s gloves, making a point that no one had ever had to make out loud. He kept his eyes on the ground, and there was chastisement in the tension of Mr Summers’ mouth, a frown so slight that only Bobby could even notice it at all, directed at the gawkers. Bobby included.

Now, when Bobby wanted an excuse to challenge him, to tear the skin off of half-healed wounds and to make him bleed – to see the pain in his eyes, potent, guilty, horror-filled – St. John looked only at the floor. Bobby watched him pass, silent with suppressed rage. He wanted to see the blisters, the scar tissue, the agony, the evidence of St. John’s undoing. Instead, he saw their effects, and his stomach turned.

 _What wouldn’t you wish on your worst enemy?_

He’d been on comms duty when they’d heard: Had thought, _Ten months – I guess no one wins the pool_ – with a disconnected, irrelevant hint of amusement. Now, watching John’s back (not in any metaphorical sense), he saw long knotted muscles of strain and nothing that justified anything. No cause and effect; no rational relationship between crime and punishment; just crime and punishment, on their own, each as standout and as different as they could be. They proclaimed only one similar thing: _I'm hurt._

To his surprise, Bobby did not want John to hurt at all. He wanted him to feel the overwhelming guilt of twelve human lives, all the faces Bobby remembered more intimately than the flicker of heat at his ear, all the bright lights and explosions and commotion. Bobby wanted John to weep; he wanted him to fall on his knees in grief, not pain: to be as dumbstruck, angry and disgusted as Bobby had been, all twelve times.

Hurting and suffering were two different animals.

Bobby felt Marie’s breath on his neck, urging him to turn to her, to share; and he found that though he wanted to tell her, there were no words for the hate stirring him, nothing to explain the feeling of extreme loss. Nothing for Marie, whose cold skin Bobby had tasted only twice before: She withdrew to her own room, with an air of understanding both aggravating and sad. He sought words and could find only an apology, of sorts, something to soothe the burn of St. John’s return; but found nothing to take it away, to replace it.

The slight, skinny figure, as bound by leather as anything at the Xavier Institute, walked down the hall; and St. John did not look back to see Bobby frozen there, nor the tempest of emotion playing itself out on his face. Bobby could feel his features molding themselves to the storm in his mind, but found no solace, nothing to calm the waves. Nothing to make this better or reasonable or to place it into some kind of context in reality – just the reality itself, hard, cold like ice, but without perspective, too close – or too far – for Bobby to grasp.

He came back with burnt hands, short hair, blank eyes: In a word, he came back broken.

~

 _Almost summer, and the hot sun is early this year, bearing down on New York state with as much intensity as the earth can take._

 _He can feel the wind at his heels, stirring the grass between his bare toes. “I’ve never done this before,” he admits, leaning back on his elbows to stare at the summersky. It seems endlessly blue, endlessly wide, smeared only occasionally with clouds. He feels foolish waxing poetic about the sky – even silently – and turns his attention to his shaggy-haired, heavy-lidded companion._

 _“Done what?” St. John asks, half-asleep, even though it’s nearly two in the afternoon. It’s a talent of his, the ability to sleep anywhere. Bobby thinks that if he’d had to sleep in the places his roommate John has slept, he would find it easier to doze off randomly, in class, outside, wherever._

 _“Played hooky,” Bobby says, and John snorts, a patient, amused kind of sound Bobby is not unfamiliar with. “What?” he asks, wondering if he has misused the term._

 _“Nothing.” John smirks, though, and Bobby just looks at him, until he breaks. There is something untellable about his face, under the bright afternoon sun. “I just haven’t heard anyone born after 1975 call it ‘playing hooky’, that’s all,” he adds, looking as though he’s enjoying a personal joke immensely. “But I guess things are different. In New York.”_

 _Bobby feels kind of stupid, as he often does with his roommate, who stings unexpectedly – an expert in sarcastic surgical strikes. This time, though, there is not an undercurrent of spite; St. John is merely amused, not lashing out, and, over the past few months, Bobby has come to appreciate the difference. Sometimes there is a hint of malice in otherwise benign words, edging out subtly, as though to say, , I am not like you. . Not that this isn’t obvious, but St. John seems to need the reminder sometimes himself, as though he occasionally shakes himself out and up from the daydream everyone else lives in permanently._

 _“Well, I’ve never cut class before,” Bobby sighs, a little too nervous to be defensive – and even if he hadn’t been, there’s no point, not usually. John isn’t the kind of guy who will back off, tail between his legs: There is too much steel in him, however damaged, to worry what Bobby thinks of him. More likely, Bobby would get a gaze like a brick wall, and the conversation would end._

 _John snorts a little. “Well, you are the teacher’s pet. Summers’ll probably skin you alive for missing physics.” Malevolent glee – an emotion Bobby had only had a passing aquaintance with until recently. “Sure you don’t want to run back and tell him your shoelaces got caught in your locker?”_

 _There’s nothing he would like to do less. He shakes his head, not trusting his tongue in this strange company, nor his companion to be gentle with him. Even the normal kids at the school – if such a creature existed – called him a momma’s boy; he’d stopped trusting his words around John for a long time. Yet something keeps him from complaining, though in another person it would certainly have prompted a report or two to Professor Xavier – there is just something a little extraordinary about St. John Allerdyce, something that makes him shut up, even when John is at his most unsettling._

 _It’s something like self-confidence, something like self-hatred, something Bobby has never seen before. Independence and co-dependence and snappish, ill-natured rhetorical questions that, paradoxically, make Bobby like him more._

 _“Then,” John says, with a smile that is not expansive, not white-toothed, not coated in practise, but still soaked in summer heat, “I guess I’ll have to keep on corrupting you.” Something very hidden in the pit of Bobby’s stomach jumps and twists at that; he lies back and, watchful, wonders if St. John will ever say something to him without a subtle, hidden meaning._

 _Wonders if he will ever decipher those meanings before the time is long past that they’re useful._

~

He was the talk of the school, the fallen hero, the straw man they knocked down when life lacked colour; now back, now just a failed villain, they stopped talking. The whispers in the hall turned to Pietro Maximoff in Venezuela, stirring up revolution, and the brief but unmistakable appearance of Raven Darkholme behind the president at his last press conference – a reminder that no one was safe. Bobby was thankful for the silence; it gave his thoughts a refuge from obsession.

It wasn’t like they hadn’t _known_ something was wrong; it was just that they had never thought he would go that far, run the extra distance. He wasn’t a go-getter, like Bobby, or someone accomplished, like the late Miss Grey; he wasn’t a people-pleaser, like Marie, nor an A-type personality, like Mr Summers. He was just the lazy, procrastinatory, occasionally vicious guy who happened to be Bobby’s roommate, who’d become his friend by default.

No – that was untrue. Partially by default, partially by fascination, and partially because, when Bobby was being strictly, completely fair (and he tried to avoid it as much as he could), John was a half-decent guy sometimes. Only sometimes, usually so unexpectedly that it took Bobby a few days to catch up, and by that time it was gone, replaced with tired sneering.

They never talked about St. John’s previous life, though it flickered into view sometimes, like an old movie projection, telling a rough story with a broken timeline. Time on the streets, mostly, a lot of time to think and to get bitter and to get angry; less time with a family, any family, real or foster or neither. John had never spoken of it directly. It came in missives, or as proof of superiority, like, _Well, ‘till you’ve slept with a hot girl in a stolen car and had the police haul you up in the morning with a hard-on, I don’t think you can fucking talk._

John had been irritating, aggravating, and capricious, never settling on anything for long; always looking, catlike, toward the future – his next meal, his next ticket out of boredom.

It made sense, when he went to Magneto: It was the next step in a long climb (though descent or ascent, no one could tell) in the story of St. John Allerdyce’s life. _Reach for the top,_ a poster in Mr Summers’ office told them, and John was reaching, up and away, leaving his personal dead behind. It wasn’t Bobby’s fault – or everyone told him that, without knowing why it might be – and Bobby thought, personally, that if a guy was a jerk, a guy was a jerk.

There were certain other words appropriate to the newly-christened Pyro, but Bobby tried not to think them too hard, when the professor was around. Bobby, good-guy Bobby, holding-it-together Bobby, _that_ Bobby cared; but John never had, only once commenting that it was just a little quaint. Whatever that meant.

And now he was back, bringing with him the slow burn in Bobby’s stomach that warned of a possible storm to come, that beckoned back to hot summer days and the scent of fresh-cut grass and things that Bobby, looking back, still could not completely understand.

Like doing the wrong thing; an act that Bobby now knew intimately, where before he had only had a vague idea, like knowing without seeing what’s on cable TV late at night. Like doing the wrong thing, and thinking it was the right thing, unequivocally, for a few merciful seconds.

Like liking it. Like not getting caught.

~

 _They’re kissing; Bobby has never kissed another boy before, and there is smoke – not cigarette smoke – on John’s breath, which is . . . interesting. It should probably be worrisome to smell smoke out here in the woods, but Bobby’s mind is occupied less with the practical concerns, and more with the interesting flavour, like campfire woodsmoke._

 _Less interesting than the kissing itself, which is heated without the help of mutant powers, makes him feel out-of-control, and makes the tips of his ears ice up. Most guys get hot; Bobby gets cold. Freezes up. His lips move like a prayer without words, pressed up against St. John, tongues and teeth and noses clashing hard. Nothing like kissing a girl. Nothing, probably, like kissing anyone who doesn’t like you and hate you in equal measure, as he is usually sure John does. He can feel his skin cool in degrees. It’s counterintuitive._

 _“Frigid,” John murmurs, moving ever so slightly away, with a smile on his mouth like there’s something more he’d like to say. He’s wearing a ripped t-shirt and shorts, and does not look like anyone on the websites Bobby visits late at night, clearing his History tab and praying no one’s watching the network (like they’d care). It should say ‘bad boy’, and says, instead, ‘does not care’, in big flashing letters. His hair is in Bobby’s eyes._

 _“Very funny. Done corrupting me?” Bobby asks, breathlessly, because it’s such the perfect thing to ask at this moment in time. Cliché and out of every bad boy/good girl (or bad boy/good boy) movie in history. But Bobby is nothing if not a cliché, because he hates this and loves this and it chills him right down to the lows of his body temperature (pegged by Dr Grey at 89.2F) – right down to the lows where his whole body is cool and clean and he feels invincible, even when he’s not._

 _Like right now. “Do you want me to be?” asks St. John, carelessly stepping back, leaning against a tree in the woods and lighting a cigarette. His mouth, wicked, swollen and full, curves. “I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for, uh,_ playing hooky _again."_

 _Bobby feels brave enough to kiss him again, and John’s hand – hot either by the laws of relativism, or because he feels the opposite effects of passion – tangles in his hair, by his neck, possessive, lips messy and uncontrolled. Kissing like this, as opposed to kissing Sally Wright in fourth grade, is frightening and real and solid, face-to-face; kissing like this, as opposed to imagining kissing Marie, is like summer. It comes and you’re not surprised, although the weather’s changed and suddenly you can wear shorts._

 _There is something wild and unpredictable about St. John, something that keeps Bobby from closing his swollen mouth and going back to his maybe-sometime-someday girlfriend with a clean conscience. Something clean and warm that Bobby doesn’t really understand._

 _Something like camaraderie and rivalry, though where one begins and the other ends, he couldn’t say._

 _“Stop thinking, Bobby,” St. John murmurs into his ear, and Bobby can feel himself melting into John’s edges, forgetting. Just for a little while; and with that, he can fool himself forever._

~

Marie looked at him with eyes that understood and didn’t understand; she had his voice in her head, but not his heart in her heart, and it had, over the last few months, been worse that way. “You miss him,” she guessed, sitting cross-legged on the bed that used to be St. John’s, and now houses Bobby’s dirty clothes.

 _I hate him_ , Bobby thought, bleakly, wondering how it came to this – how he had come not only to believe in hate, but actively participate in it. “No,” he said, shaking his head, wondering how it had come to this. Marie understanding while he was in the dark; Marie understanding when he wanted her to close her eyes to this, to the knowledge she had that he had never meant to give her. With his feet on the carpet, he felt like he could come to believe these half-truths, until they were all the truth, nothing but the truth.

“Naw, sugar,” Marie said, not smiling. “You missed the hell out of that boy. Didn’t we all.” _Even though he was the world’s biggest prick; even though he looked at me like I shouldn’t exist._ Didn’t we all. If she could say it, he should have been able to, but he just shook his head again, staring at his bitten thumbnails. “You should go see him.”

“Yeah, right,” Bobby muttered, sounding and feeling childish.

“Bobby.” Marie was reproachful; and when the hell did she get to be so damn mature, anyway? It was unfair, the way her eyes would light up with wisdom and goodness and courage, when Bobby could hardly summon a good mood to greet her with. They were ex now, but still friends, and it took more effort than Bobby liked to admit, these days. “Bobby, you should go see him. For closure.”

He wished he could ask her: _For what?_ , but she knew. Of course she did. Probably everyone did; and probably everyone understood better than he did. “I don’t need closure,” he said shortly, feeling the rumble of aggressiveness in his throat. “I had it already.”

“Oh, sugar,” Marie said, “you are so full of shit.” And she leaned forward to brush a fleeting kiss on his forehead, not even enough contact to initiate that pull of him to her, just enough for the tingle of skin-to-skin to remind him of John’s skin to his skin, John’s heat to his ice.

Bobby did not tell her to go to hell, but he thought it really loudly. Something in the back of his mind muttered, _Sorry, Professor._

They sat in silence, Marie on John’s old bed, Bobby on his own bed, only a few feet – and a few souls, most of them hers – apart. It was like they had so much to say and nothing to say to one another anymore. In all aspects, particularly adulthood, she was beyond him.

“Talk to the professor,” Marie suggested quietly, dropping out of the accent in seriousness. “He knows.” And she left Bobby in his dark room, thinking his dark thoughts, alone. She was very beautiful in the moonlight; moreso when her eyes flashed bright and green, jungle-coloured, and her lips moved into a sympathetic smile that was unjealous, forgiving, and not Marie’s at all. A lot had happened that John hac been party to, more than the sins of murder, of betrayal: More than Marie’s flight and Jean’s death.

 _Talk to the professor._ Bobby closed his eyes and tries not to hate time; it is, after all, the one thing he’s got going for him. _He knows._

That made it worse: Proof that Bobby was not an isolated casualty in this war. Proof that he was not alone. Proof that someone understood.

Proof that there wasn’t much hope, after all.

~

 _Sweat soaks the covers; bite marks pattern his jaw. Lying abed on a Monday morning, as John put it, door locked against intruders, legs tangled and messy and wrong. Bobby is guilty._

 _The sheets are frozen down at the foot of the bed._

 _“Still nervous that you’ll get caught?” St. John is mocking him, missing the point, as always. That’s often the way it works, with them. “I mean, we are cutting class,” he adds facetiously. Like it’s Scott Summers or Jean Grey Bobby’s worried about. Like that’s what’s at stake._

 _Wide brown eyes, a girl’s eyes, stare at Bobby in his mind’s eye; he turns over, onto his stomach, away from John’s heat. Almost immediately, St. John flings an arm over his shoulderblades. A warning, Bobby thinks._

 _It is the fourth time he has cut class, and the first time he’s been naked – naked that way – with another guy. Or with anyone, though he thinks he might have been able to fake away that virginity, like he fakes street sense when he’s clothed. He feels flushed and hot and guilty, knowing that he won’t be caught, knowing that he should be._

 _Justice works in funny ways, sometimes, Bobby thinks, remembering Magneto’s shadows in Marie’s face, remembering John’s first day at the mansion, spent staring out the windows like a trapped cat. The way John will still pace, confined. The way John holds him down, now, pressing his shoulders down to the bed – though whether this is a kind of pinning down, or a safety measure, or something between the two, Bobby doesn’t know. It is the hot and potent smell of smoke, dangerous, like setting off fires at the mall, or open insolence to Mr Summers._

 _John’s lips brush his shoulder, hotter than hot against the slow freeze of his powers, and Bobby closes his eyes to the guilt. It is not right – he has never been taught that it is right to cheat on one’s girlfriend with one’s roommate, and is sure his mother would disapprove on more than the strictly obvious – but there is something about the sensation, something about the half-clinical, half-improvisational hands at the hollow of his hip, an inch from his groin, that keeps him going. Motivates him to continue on._

 _It’s a little bit like falling in love. Without the MPAA-approved pleasant parts._

~

It was two weeks before Bobby could bring himself to venture downstairs, past the Danger Room, past the infirmary, into the real medlab, reinforced, for now, with fireproof locks on the doors. He took the day off from school – NYU business, accounting every other day with a prof who couldn’t be bothered with undergrads anyway – and steeled himself against the cracked and fractured body beneath the Xavier Institute. Their newest rescue, also their newest enemy.

A single pot of African violets graced the nightstand. St. John – Pyro – was lying on his bed with his hands wrapped firmly in white. Miss Munroe’s garden; Dr McCoy’s handiwork.

Bobby didn’t know where to start, so he started nowhere, instead sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair next to the hospital bed, trying not to smell the antiseptic. Anger was comfortable, but pity – deep pity – was unacceptable, even for someone breathing heavily from pain. Burns. Bobby wondered if this was poetic justice; or if it was just the way John had been brought down, after all that time spent as Pyro, all those hours of his life wasted.

“What the hell do you want,” John said flatly, without sparing Bobby a glance. If he’d needed proof that there wasn’t anything good between them, this would have been it. Bad blood all around. St. John had too much pride, and Bobby hadn’t enough: But there they were, neither with anything to be proud of, drained of reserves, staring at one another.

“To see you,” Bobby said, shrugging. _To see how much you hurt_ , he didn’t add, though it was true.

John snorted. “This isn’t some kind of social call, is it?” His voice was raspy – probably smoke inhalation, given the burns. A little mechanism in John’s right hand beeped, and Bobby followed the cord to a small IV. Morphine.

 _You wanted to know_ , he told himself, but his eyes leapt to the floor. Guilt and satisfaction, blending seamlessly together. Not, when he thought about it, something new to them.

“Bobby,” John said, a minute later, sounding a little better, a little more the way he was remembered. “Would you please fuck off.”

Bobby took a deep breath and did not leave. “What happened?” he asked instead, because there was something in him that would never know; and because asking was easier than trying to describe what he felt, when John patently would never care. It was not, _Why did you leave?_ , because Bobby knew, or half-knew, why St. John had left; it was not, _Why did you come back?_ , because there was probably an answer, an obvious answer, hiding somewhere in the wings.

Something to do with being left for dead in a burning building while your mutant power goes supernova. Maybe that.

But there wasn’t an answer; nothing clear-cut that Bobby could take and forgive. There was just St. John, same as he’d always been, with words that Bobby both understood and didn’t quite get, meaning under meaning. “It’s a war,” John told him with those dark, dead-set straight-staring eyes, the focus he’d never had to have before. He paused, snorted a little, and smiled a smile that had nothing of the old confidence, everything of the new fragility. “Just never thought I’d be a fuckin’ casualty, that’s all.”

Bobby could not find the courage to find words, a retort, any sympathy; but one of his hands found an unburnt spot on John’s shoulder, comfort and condemnation both.

“Fuck you,” John whispered, turning his head away from Bobby; and they stayed like that while the afternoon upstairs sweltered. Bobby only thought once of the accounting lecture he was missing, and then only in passing, in a sweep of nostalgia. It had always been a little like this with them, slightly illicit, perpetually breaking one rule or another.

So there they were. Silent, angry, unforgiving, both hard like ice and hot like fire, each surpassing their own cliches. Waiting for a moment that would probably come and be gone before either of them realised it had been there at all; and then they would go on from there, as friends did, as lovers did, as enemies did.

It was simple, but never easy. Just then, Bobby thought it might even be better that way.


End file.
